While the warmer days of spring presage a shift from red wine to white, there is one variety that is pretty much the cultivar for all seasons — pinot noir. Significantly less tannic than other reds, paler in colour and characterised more by fruit than richness or weight in the mouth, pinot noir straddles the flavour and textural features of red and white wines.
Pinot noir’s traditional heartland is the Côte d’Or region in Burgundy, France. However, only a little more than one percent of the region’s total production falls into its highest-quality category (the grand cru sites). There is actually more pinot planted in Champagne than in Burgundy. This tells you that, even where pinot flourishes, there are very few sites where it yields amazing wine.
This problem, the difference between good pinot noir and the hauntingly beautiful great bottles, plays itself out in numerous ways. One is in the assumption that all good pinot is potentially great pinot and could, over time, qualify for the same insane pricing. The other is that critics should succumb to the seductive charms of this hypothesis and rate the wines accordingly.
As we approach the end of the year, the various competitions, reports and feedback from the wine industry’s equivalent of ratings agencies begin to appear with inexorable regularity. I recently received a mail from a reader who posed an interesting question. “It seems to me,” he said, “that Bordeaux gets consistently higher scores than Burgundy. There are always two or three 100-point Bordeaux wines in every vintage, but it seems to be far more rare to find a 100-point Burgundy.”
There was an element of this debate in an exchange that appeared in WineMag recently. At issue was the question of whether the publication’s editor had been too parsimonious in scoring the various cuvées of Hannes Storm’s wines. By way of a response, one of the correspondents pointed out that Peter-Allan Finlayson’s 2018 Crystallum Cuvée Cinema, widely regarded as the Cape’s consistently “sexiest” fine pinot, had garnered 98 points at a Decanter tasting in the UK. In the ensuing debate I mentioned I hadn’t tasted the latest Crystallums and Finlayson kindly dispatched some samples.
In about 2009 I became the first reviewer of Crystallum for the Platter Guide. I watched the wines, mainly from young vines, as they grew in interest and stature. Finlayson, who also makes the Gabriëlskloof wines, is comfortably one of the Cape’s finest and most thoughtful winemakers. If pinot noir were only about winemaking and not about site, he would pretty much lead the charge every year.
I tasted the three vintages he sent me alongside several other well-known Cape pinots, all blind. My scoring is significantly less generous than all other reviewers plying this market, so there was never going to be an easy passage for any of them into the now-fashionable 95+ range.
However, even taking this into account, none of the wines, Crystallum or otherwise, did better than 94. Finlayson’s three vintages all had identical scores, which, recalibrated to the international system, saw them in the early 90s, a very creditable result. They all shared a common thread — dark, black-cherry notes, restrained but evident spice. Some of the others were earthier, with more evident whiffs of undergrowth.
What does this mean for SA pinot? Finlayson’s wines sell for just less than R600 a bottle. They deliver ample pleasure at that not-exactly-frivolous price point. You would have to pay three times more to land a comparable bottle from New Zealand’s Central Otago. There are, of course, hundreds of Burgundies you might prefer, up to the moment you have to pay for them.
However, even then, to get pleasure commensurate with price, you would need them to be at least 30 years old. One of the reasons there are so few 100-point wines, even from pinot’s home base, is that site, the elapse of time and price are all inextricably linked.
